Recently Mentioned Books

William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.

5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium . So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus.  It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away.  I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024.  The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened.  The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.

4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis .  One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment.  For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well.  Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay.  Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you!  If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare.  Recommended, for all those who care.

3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman .  The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition.  But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.

2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art , edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans.  Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work.  Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture.  Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.”  A wonder...

1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create .  Could the be the best book on NFTs?  I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future.  In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.”  Do you pass or fail this test?  The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…

Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oklahoma! , the complete score (for the first time recorded), John Wilson and Sinfonia of London.

Monteverdi, Vespro Della Beata Vergine , conducted by Raphaël Pichon, covered here by the NYT .  Monteverdi’s greatest work, and this recording has been receiving special praise from many quarters.

Frank Peter Zimmermann, Bach, sonatas and partitas for solo violin , volumes one and two.  These are some of my favorite works to buy multiple versions of.  I started off preferring the Milstein recordings, which still are wonderful.  Last year went through a Biondi phase, now am enamored of these.  I never tire of these pieces.

Handel, The Eight Great Suites and Overtures , Francesco Corti.  My whole life I’ve preferred these for piano, say by Richter.  Corti is converting me to the harpsichord versions.

By Benjamin Moser, I loved this book .  It is one of my favorite books of art criticism ever, written from the perspective of a fan I might add.  It talks you through the pictures and the lives of the 17th century Dutch artists and tries to tie it all together.  It doesn’t spend too much time on the super-famous works or the anecdotes you might already know.

You can pre-order the book here , it is self-recommending of course.  And here is my earlier Conversation with Glenn Loury .

The new Douglas J. Weatherford translation is probably as good as it is going to get.  The work is intrinsically difficult to translate, so try the Spanish if you can, or read the two jointly together, switching back and forth.  And as they like to say in Haiti, “if you’re not confused, you don’t know what’s going on.”

That is the new book by David Beito, and the subtitle is The Untold Story of FDR’s Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance .  Here is the closing passage:

Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks.  As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response.  Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here.  In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty ?  Is it not enough to share the same soup?  Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid o...

Tyrone is accompanying me, and I asked him what he thinks.  As you might expect, he had only stupid rudeness in response.  Tyrone said that northern Argentina is the true essence of the Argentinean nation, and that everyone interested in Argentina should visit here.  In fact, having visited North Macedonia, he wishes to rename the country South Bolivia — were they not once part of the same Viceroyalty ?  Is it not enough to share the same soup?  Do they not have broadly the same accent, devoid o...

Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.

Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.

Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations .  A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.

Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas , edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett.  A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list .  Or does this count as fiction ?  It’s mostly about things that happened.

Thomas Bell, Kathmandu .  There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact.  Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques.  The same is true of the city as a whole.”  And how do they still have so many Maoists?

There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen .  Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen.  If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon.  Another option is to read a book like this one.  It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.

Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class .  Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack.  He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen.  He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.  This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.

The dishes are explained as they were consumed, the meal was excellent, of course the company too.  A very good episode, highly rated for all lovers of Chinese food.  And here is Fuchsia’s new book, Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food , self-recommending.  And here are previous MR mentions of Fuchsia , including links to my two earlier CWTs with her.

That is from Louis Awad, the Egyptian literary critic, reproduced in Islam Issa’s quite interesting Milton in the Arab-Muslim World .